Mitchell Hagerstrom's Blog, page 3

THE NAMBO

They say the roof of the Nambo is a very pleasant place in the evening, that a cool breeze comes off the lagoon and people have a merry time. I have asked the governor general to take me there sometime. He has agreed but will not say when. --from Miss Gone-overseas.

The Nambo, shown here in the 1960s, was one of the town’s few structures that survived the American bombing during WWII. The store had been established by the Nan’yo Boeki Kaishi (the South Seas Trading Company), the preeminent government-sponsored corporation of the Japanese mandate years (end of WWI to end of WWII) -- the nickname Nambo being a play off the name of the owning company.

Japanese department stores have been long famous for their spectacular rooftop entertainments: beer gardens, zoos, restaurants, miniature amusement parks. As a small-scale version, the Nambo is said to have had caged monkeys and was lit at night with strings of fairy lights. My narrator visits the Nambo’s roof several times, for drinks and to enjoy the evening breeze off the lagoon. She mentions the fairy lights but not the monkeys -- no doubt they were gone by that time.

Earlier in the book she makes a daytime stop and buys ink and a spare nib for her fountain pen. Kimiko, a friend who accompanies her, buys a new umbrella. I imagine the Nambo as being akin to the small-town general stores and so called ‘five and dimes’ I remember as a child -- in keeping with the town of Kolonia (called the district center in my book) being a mere colonial backwater settlement.

When I lived on the island in the 1980s, the hulk of the Nambo was the same sturdy concrete building on the waterfront road. No longer an office, it housed a machine shop and garage for the Public Works Department. In this older photo, I note a Japanese postal box in front -- I hope this is now in the possession of the Pohnpei Historic Office.
[photo courtesy of Anthony Lord]

IN THE LAND OF DREAMY DREAMS

Once upon a time, I embroidered a sun and a moon on the yoke of a plain muslin dress I’d made for my five-year old daughter. Well, monkey see, monkey do -- she wanted to try her hand at it. So I gave her a swatch of leftover muslin, a needle, a selection of thread, and an embroidery frame, and she set to work.

The palms did not surprise me as this was Southern California and the view from our porch included a stately row of them across the street. When I quizzed her about the other parts of the picture, she pointed out the snake and the snake’s hole across from the house. As far as I knew there were no snakes or snake holes in our neighborhood. I’ve forgotten what she said about that puddle of red pencil. And the house on stilts -- where ever did that come from, I asked? She shrugged. Dunno, she said.

Perhaps the image of a house on stilts came from a photograph in a National Geographic, or from a library picture book? Or did it come from dreams? As a child she was fairly psychic, a regular little Cassandra who, in Greek myth, fell asleep and snakes whispered to her (or licked her ears), enabling her to know the future. Did my daughter intuit that one day she and I would live half a world away in tropical landscape with a high proportion of palm trees and houses on stilts? [but no snakes at all.] Houses such as this:



What I believe about her embroidery is that the composition came from dreamy dreams, springing from her mind’s eye, just as any invention does -- whether it be an embroidered picture, a poem, a painting, a new form of harnessing energy, or even Einstein’s Relativity. My daughter’s untutored stitching, a skill she honed by merely looking over my shoulder, has a charming primitiveness. It admonishes me daily -- from its frame on my bedroom wall -- tsk-tsking that I should be spending a lot more time in my own land of dreamy dreams.

FLOWERS OF THE FLOATING WORLD

Flowers of the Floating World at a Tokyo Train Station is a ukiyo-e woodblock print of the Utagawa school, probably early Meiji period (late 1800s). In Western parlance, the Flowers are ladies-of-the-night and the Floating World is the demi-monde. By their flamboyant dress, these flowers cannot be mistaken for anything else, nor do they try to hide the fact.

I’m reminded that soon after Miss Gone-overseas arrived on the island, she witnessed the departure of a number of the Japanese colony’s women and children who were seeking safety from the war. They were being sent to the homeland on the same ship on which she herself arrived. In the fashion typical of ship departures in the Pacific tropics, flowers abound -- leis and mwarmwar -- and she notes all the tears.

Watching one particular man say goodbye to his young son brings tears to her own eyes, reminding her of another departure, but one with no flowers, no ship, and definitely no tears. Instead, it was the departure of soldiers, bound for Manchuria, from a train station in rural Japan. Little did she know, she herself was the only flower on the station platform that day. Or perhaps I should say, flower bud.

America is said to be a mobile society. Supposedly, through merit one can rise, just as through stupidity one can fail. I cannot speak for contemporary Japan, but the country depicted in this woodblock and in my novella Miss Gone-overseas, was not a mobile society. My Miss Gone-overseas, the same as the ladies in this wood block, had only one option into another life: to find a patron who would sponsor her in a commercial enterprise, usually a teashop or a restaurant or her own brothel.

Those who have read Miss Gone-overseas know that my heroine creates a unique option for herself. Most readers have expressed a desire to know how that option turned out for her. So, I gave her a speaking part in my story Same Father, Different Mother and I mentioned her in Under the Flame Tree (both in Overseas: stories). I’m feeling, perhaps, this is not enough. Cross your fingers for me, and stay tuned.

AQUARIUM BLUES

Note the world famous dancer/choreographer lurking in the background. Then squint, and find the four black and white clown fish. Somehow, I doubt Baryshnikov could teach those graceful beings anything. Placing him there as an overseer was a whim of my daughter’s.

In Micronesia, expats come and go, but a good deal of their “stuff” remains -- via yard sales, but mostly out&out giveaways. I acquired this bare-bones aquarium -- tank and aerating pump -- from the departing Ostroff family. When I left the Welter family acquired it and they, no doubt, passed it on, too. Of the half dozen or so things I did keep, one is a miniature, 2-inch coral head.

Years later, when I came to use Micronesia as subject matter, I placed a couple of fish tanks in my short stories (see Islands: stories on amazon). The house Geneva visits in Under The Flame Tree has a large tank, unlike any I ever saw there. And, in Blue Damsels, I gave the husband my own desire for a tankful of blue damselfish (playing on the double meanings of both blue and damsel). And the husband of that story being a doctor may have come from the fact that the paterfamilias of both the Ostroffs and the Welters were doctors. Who knows?

Anyway, umpteen years before this, I had known a couple who had a huge salt-water tank, six-feet long and stocked with a large number of exotic aquatic beings from the exotic fish store. Sitting in front of it was much more entertaining than watching t.v., and since then I’d had a hankering to have one of my own. I figured it would be especially nice on an island with no t.v.

As there were no exotic fish stores on-island, my daughter and I armed ourselves with a net and a bucket, and set off for Tom’s Beach (see a previous blog). Those small, iridescent-blue damselfish were so elusive. They congregated in the large, lacy coral heads on the other side of the narrow boat channel, and when disturbed the whole school would rise as one entity from all crevices, maintaining a strict formation, and then whisk themselves away -- too quick for me and my net.

We were never able to capture more than a few, so I never had that choreographed, darting school of blue dancers. We did bring back some hermit crabs who would scrabble sideways, endlessly, back and forth across the front of the tank, staring out at us -- as though they knew they were wrongly incarcerated -- constantly demanding: why, why, why? I offered them shiny new shells for housing (& usually they took me up on the offer), but the despair in their eyes pretty much put me off ever having another fish tank or, for that matter, any other caged being. Perhaps that is why, at the end of Miss Gone-overseas, I set her free.

BLESS THIS BROTHEL

Check out the small maneki-neko on that high shelf, its left arm (the lucky arm) raised in benediction or salutation. This statue is a welcoming cat, and is a de rigor ornament of Japanese businesses, be it a noodle shop, a stationery store, or even a brothel. [Brothels were legal in Japan up until the late 1950s.]

Although Miss Gone-overseas is set on a Japanese-held Pacific Island in the early 1940s, I’ve borrowed this still from film about brothel workers in the 1950s because the number of ladies pictured here exactly matches the number of my fictional ones, the brothel workers of the Hifumi. Perhaps the shadowy figure in the doorway is the brothel manager, Mrs. Okata, just checking on her “girls” who are having a late afternoon snack, delicious noodles from the shop next door.

Yes, they are girls -- not women or ladies. No matter how old the prostitute she is, it would be rude not to call her a girl. On the left is Mieko, my MissGO, who appears to be writing in her notebook. She’s the newest arrival and is most favored by the governor general who enjoys a girl pouring his sake when he visits his pal, Mrs. Okata, for a game of Go.

Next is Yukio, properly slurping her noodles. Then Sumiko, the quiet one, lost in thought. Then Izumi, the one who can boogie-woogie like nobody else. It’s Izumi who entices Yukio to join her in getting permanent waves, flouting Mrs. Okata’s dress code that everyone look old-fashioned.

And, finally, sprawled out along the bottom, almost as shadowy as Mrs Okata in the background, is Chikako. All she wants is another cup of sake and a nap. Mieko, at one point, writes in her notebook that she fears ending up like Chikako: depressed and drunk.

Some Japanese women might have preferred brothel work to being a drudge to a harsh mother-in-law, but I can assure you not one came to the business as a lark, or expecting a fun career. All were debt-slaves, having been sold into the industry by their families (out of either greed or need).

When a brothel worker has worked long enough to pay off the debt and is free to leave, where will she go, how will she “keep” herself? One who is practical-minded will stay until she has saved enough to invest in some other business, or until she finds a sponsor who will do that for her. She dreams of having her own place, be it a noodle shop, a stationery store, or even a brothel -- with her own maneki-neko blessing it.

[photo source: Shohei Imamura, The Insect Woman (1963)>]

ON THE FARM

A family snapshot, taken in the mid-1950s in rural Japan, shows one of my brothers hand-feeding a goat, while a younger brother runs across the background. In addition to farmyard goats, silkworms were raised in the attic of the farmhouse. I imagined them above us, chewing away on mulberry leaves, as we were invited inside, as we sat at a low table and were served small cups of warm, fresh-squeezed, goat milk. Pretty much a memory that sticks, no?

During our year in Japan, my parents made sure we sampled Japanese culture: learning to use both hashi [chopsticks] and a smattering of essential Japanese phrases, negotiating going to school by ourselves via the trains (at ages 11, 9 & 6), taking drawing lessons from a Japanese teacher, and enjoying family outings to gardens, shrines and museums -- in addition to shopping trips to the big downtown department stores and, of course, our local market street.

Our rental house in Tokyo was a real Japanese home. The living room was Western-style, but the rest was classic Japanese: tatami mats, low tables and cushion seating, shoji screens, and a crude kitchen (by American standards). The wall of the two main rooms was sliding glass doors that could open entirely to the garden -- and, yes, there was a tiny decorative fish pond. To us, nightly bathing was exotic: a deep tub that was heated by a fire-box that had to be fed from outside with wood or charcoal. We would emerge lobster red -- literally.

When I first sat down to write Miss Gone-overseas, there was no plan. The main character’s backstory evolved as I progressed and I came to understand what sort of woman would be writing as she did. Her grammar was simple, evidence of a decent, basic education, but nothing more; and her naivety told me she was most likely from the countryside, not city-raised.

Had I never lived in Japan, I could not/would not have written Miss Gone-overseas. As it was, I knew firsthand when my character reminisces about waking in her family’s house that the first thing she saw would be the room’s fusuma -- the paper sliding screen painted with autumn maple leaves, or somesuch. I knew about the deep tubs where, before entering, one washed with soap, sponge, and a pail of water.

The book’s first line -- We have been separated -- pretty much wrote itself. The story’s plot -- based on the very real drama of World War II -- moved the story forward. When I started the book, all I knew was who she was and why she was on that small island in the Western Pacific. As my father would say: I flew by the seat of my pants.

JOY LUNCH

Joy Lunch -- what an apt name for such a glorious plate. Mention it to any expat or local of Kolonia, Pohnpei, and their face lights up (or whatever’s the equivalent on facebook). Clockwise from bottom right: sashimi, lime and a daub of wasabi, rice, salad with 1000 island dressing, panko-crusted tuna nuggets, a plop of tartar sauce, a bottle of shoyu on the table, and your choice of fork or hashi/chopsticks. Wuzzes could substitute canned corn for the rice.

During my five years on-island I probably ate Joy Lunch several times a week, and those five years were some of the healthiest years of my life. My parents had a large garden that supplied us daily with fresh-picked picked pineapple and papaya. It is no exaggeration to say that we lived in Paradise.

The indigenous diet of Pacific Islanders is based on fish, root crops, tropical fruit, coconut and leafy greens -- a diet that’s considered one of the best in the world. So how come contemporary islanders have such a high instance of diabetes and high blood pressure? Simple answer: too many have been converted to the diet of their most recent colonial overlord: America.

During the early days of the American Trust mandate of the islands we shipped them turkey tails, Spam and soft drinks. The imports have since become more sophisticated, but not much healthier. At least the Japanese during their mandate encouraged the consumption of local products, albeit with a Japanese twist -- such as the wonderful Joy Lunch.

The worst meal I ever ate in those five years was a Kosraean version of that American icon: the club sandwich. The version I was served was a three-decker using untoasted white bread and layered with Spam in lieu of bacon or ham, a fried egg in lieu of sliced turkey or chicken, and slathered with a mayonnaise-heavy cold slaw in lieu of lettuce and tomato.

I like to imagine an import-free refinement of Joy Lunch: the tuna crusted with coconut flakes instead of panko, a spiced-up concoction of coconut cream instead tartar sauce, lime & grated ginger for dipping the sashimi instead of shoyu & wasabi, a larger and greener salad (with a dressing based on coconut oil, lime, salt & Pohnpei pepper), chunks of yam or breadfruit instead of rice. It’s enough to set one singing:

Joy to the world!
Joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea,
Joy to you and me!
lyrics by Hoyt Axton, et al, performed in 1970 by Three Dog Night
foto: Teresita Tee San Jose

SCHOOL DAYS

In the early 1930s, master wood carver Hisakatsu Hijakata introduced a new form of tourist art to the Japanese colony on the Micronesian island of Palau. He encouraged his local students to combine the traditional low-relief carvings found on support beams of Palauan meeting houses with a high-relief technique -- and to make them portable/packable. The craft industry he founded flourishes to this day. The local prison, instead of making license plates, supports a storyboard art factory

Most storyboards depict old legends. Ones of contemporary scenes are fairly rare, but I remember one commissioned by a visiting U.S. Coast Guard crew who had borrowed the embassy’s Chevy Blazer, got themselves commode-hugging drunk and totalled it. The storyboard was lovely: the tall bow of the sea-going cutter looming on one side, a toppled palm tree on the other, the crumbled Blazer in the middle, the drunk crew puking out the windows.

The storyboard pictured here is probably from the mid- to late-1930s. It depicts an administrator quizzing or lecturing students, the event attended by both local dignitaries and armed soldiers. The boys are clad in mawashi (loincloths), while the girls are dressed in middy blouses and pleated skirts, the typical uniform of young school girls in the first quarter of the 20th century. (Actually, the style carried over into my school years in Hawaii and is still the uniform at Sacred Hearts Academy in Honolulu.) Note: these are native children. Under Japanese colonial rule, island children were educated (most likely at segregated schools) and the most promising were even sent to Japan for further schooling. [image source: https://sites.google.com/site/transoc...]

Emperor Meiji (1852-1912) began introducing compulsory education for all Japanese children as part of his ushering Japan out of feudalism and into the Industrial Age. By 1920, when the narrator of Miss Gone-overseas was born, education of the masses was a given. She completed six years of schooling, and because she was an excellent student, was awarded one additional year. Hence, she was quite capable of keeping a journal, but without the classical poetic references found in the 10th Century pillow books.

Miss Gone-overseas is a simple book set in a not so simple time.

PILLOW BOOKS 101

The Western world has a history of using soft, down-filled pillows, while most of the rest of the world employed hard pillows. This storyboard from Belau [Micronesia] shows a typical hard pillow -- a rock? a coconut? -- anyway, similar to those from early Mesopotamia which were made from stone and were often carved, shaped, and decorated. Early China produced ceramic ones, and later wooden ones which were actually secret boxes for hiding such things as opium. (google for images of opium pillows).

Japan in the Middle Ages had a predilection for borrowing all things Chinese: religion, written language, literature, high culture, etc. A typical Japanese pillow of the 11th century was larger than a brick, smaller than a breadbox, and the high-end ones had shaped tops and hollow interiors suited for caching incense or small writing scrolls. Japanese pillows of later period were tall and padded to conserve elaborate hair-dos. The 11th century Heian court ladies, however, did not wear up-dos, their long hair needing only to be tied back so it would not turn into a tangled mess during the night.

While wandering the stacks of my local library, umpteen years ago, I came across a tiny section of Japanese literature (895.6 in the Dewey decimal). My first selection was Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, a lengthy multi-generational romance that held me as spellbound as it must have the original audience: Heian court ladies of the 11th century. Genji then led me to the author’s makura no soshi, or random notes of the pillow.

Being able to turn out a decent poem on a moment’s notice was de rigeur for the well-educated Heian court ladies. Besides collections of their poetry, almost a half a dozen of their pillow books have survived -- Sei Shonagon's being the most famous (and out now in a new addition), and Murasaki Shikibu’s which is my favorite as it seems more personal, more private. Sei Shonagon’s is more stylish and show-offy. A publication about the pillow books of three of these ladies is unfortunately out of print. (see: The Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan.)

Pillow books of more recent centuries are known for their erotica, a well-deserved reputation. Compiled by prostitutes of the Floating World -- ladies from the back-street demimonde -- these pillow books are apt to contain notes of the particular requirements of certain clients and are often illustrated with positions other than missionary, and are probably meant to be shared with such clients. Perhaps, as performance enhancers. (one can google images of these, too)

Even though my fictional narrator in Miss Gone-overseas is a Japanese brothel worker during World War II, her pillow book is far from erotic. Since it is composed of apparently random notes, it fits the definition of a classic pillow book, but my narrator is far from being a Heian court lady. Still, the entries feel akin to what I admire in Murasaki Shikibu’s pillow book -- entries that are personal, descriptive, often lyrical, and always as though she is writing only for herself.

Image: Belau National Museum

COME FLY WITH ME

Sinatra croons:
Come fly with me,
Let's fly, let's fly away.
If you can use some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay ….

It’s my mother’s favorite LPs spinning on my father’s fancy Braun record player (housed in a modernist blonde console some collector today would kill for). I’m listening. I’m eleven years old, belly-flopped on the living room floor, chin in hands, and crooning along (my tongue tripping on all those delicious internal rhymes). But I wonder: what exactly IS exotic booze? My father drinks a beer now and then, and I have heard of Tom Collins (some kind of adult party drink).

Flash forward nearly 30 years as I deplane in Micronesia for a five-year visit. The photo above is Continental Air Mike on the ground in Majuro, but I’m letting it stand in for my arrival on Pohnpei. The door opens and I’m smacked by the tropical heat and humidity. I descend a set of rolling stairs and walk across the tarmac to a rustic terminal: thatched roofed and open-aired. I can see my sister waving to me as I scoot through customs. But before falling into her open arms, I’m stopped short by this:



A drinking permit? Of course I sign up. Exotic booze in far Pohn’pei?

How about sakau, a mild intoxicant made from the root of a pepper plant and pounded to a muddy juice while a zillion stars twinkle above a roadside bar’s thatched roof and I sit surrounded by small groups of people speaking softly to each other in an unfamiliar language?

How about a frosty late-afternoon Fosters or (do I dare?) a martini at The Village Hotel whose bar and dining room look out over the lagoon and beyond to the vast Pacific, with an immense sky above -- each its own particular shade of blue?

How about a girls' night out with my sister and her very proper Pohnpeian lady friends who all get tabletop-dancing drunk on Kahula mixed with canned sweetened condensed milk?

How about lugging home cases of amber-bottled domestic San Miguel from the Seaman’s Club, an exceedingly seedy joint under a rusted metal roof, squatting along the only-recently paved main street?

How about a pink gin or a San Miguel on my own balcony at sundown, where every evening the sky above the lagoon presents a kaleidoscope of color as I watch and wait for the legendary and elusive green flash?

I found these examples of exotic booze to be merely a tiny portion of Pohnpei’s extraordinary merits. Those interested should google the place, and of course take a peek at my book Overseas: Stories.

image sources: http://www.pamoramio.com/photo/22667823 and University of Hawaii Manoa digital archives.